


The Day Sam Winchester Turned 27

by winchestersinthedrift



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Episode: s05e22 Swan Song, Gen, Sad, pre-episode: s05e22 Swan Song
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-31
Updated: 2015-08-31
Packaged: 2018-04-18 08:07:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4698572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winchestersinthedrift/pseuds/winchestersinthedrift





	The Day Sam Winchester Turned 27

On the day he turned 27 Sam Winchester went out and killed demons with his brother Dean. Nothing so unusual about this, really, except that this time they weren’t hunting but _harvesting_ , quick and ferocious, so Sam could drink their blood and let the Devil wear him like a skin. 

That night they finished loading up the trunk of the Impala with milk jugs of demon’s blood and Dean locked the trunk as Sam’d seen him do about seven thousand times before and they went inside. For awhile they just sat there watching Bobby searching online for omens and drinking beers. Dean had held the whiskey bottle up in a question but Sam had shook his head and asked for beer. He couldn’t have told you why, but here’s the truth: it was because beer felt like his brother and the road and like quiet nights spent lying back against the windshield of the Impala. It felt like Dean letting him drink his first beer in a motel room south of Chicago and then holding his hair while he puked it all back up. It felt like nights in the student union drinking pitchers with other freshmen and watching Jess across the U-shaped booth and like the first time he’d kissed her, both of them soft and trembling and reeking of beer fumes. 

But Sam couldn’t have told you any of that because for awhile now he’d been shutting off the boxes of his brain from each other, folding things down and flattened so that he could function in the face of the yawning gulf that roared at the back of his mind, the black clawing thing that raked down his gut whenever he was alone. 

Sam had a beer and Dean had two, and then Dean asked, ‘you wanna take the shower first?’ Sam laughed inside, dry and hollow, and wanted to say _I don’t know, will hell like it better if I show up smelling nice?_ , but he loved Dean so he didn’t say it, he kept that part just his, and said ‘sure, thanks.’ He stood so long under the water that he ran it out of hot. ‘Bitch,’ said Dean, when he heard, and Sam said ‘jerk’, but what he didn’t say was that it’d taken him that long to stop crying. 

Then Dean had gone out to the kitchen and come back with black forest cake in a square foil pan and said ‘Happy birthday, Sammy.’ 

‘Where the fuck did you get that?’ said Sam, but he smiled a little. He couldn’t really taste it but he ate it anyway, and when he was done Bobby went outside to check the truck one more time and then it was just Sam and Dean. Dean said, ‘hey, Sam,’ in the way that he had so many times they weren’t worth counting, maybe ten thousand or maybe a lot more than that. ‘Whatcha wishing?’ As soon as he said it he stopped, horrified. It was what he’d always asked on Sam’s birthday after the candles were out, if they’d had candles that year: _whatcha wishin’, Sammy? whaddaya want this year?_

Sam had wished for dogs and transformers and a gameboy when he was little, but for a long time now it had just been a yearly joke between them. Now though Sam didn’t even meet Dean’s eyes, just sat forward with his forearms on his knees and rubbed his fingers hard against his palms.

‘I wish,’ he said, in a sort of cadence so that it felt almost like a prayer, ‘that if I - when I get there - it’ll feel like a bad dream. That I’ll…that I’ll think I can wake up.’

There was nothing to say to this, but it didn’t matter, because the one place they always landed, in the end, was that they understood each other. 

‘Don’t really wanna sleep,’ Sam said finally, ‘you wanna watch a movie?’ so they sat on Bobby’s couch and put on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid but neither of them really watched it. By about the middle Sam had started shaking and Dean took his hand and held it tight in both of his and tapped across Sam’s knuckles like he used to do when Sam was little, two maybe or three. 

‘You sure?’ he said, finally, and Sam just said, so quiet he could hardly hear it, ‘there isn’t anything else Dean.’ And Dean had based his life on there always being something else but this time he knew Sam was right. 

When Dean woke up the next morning, sprawled awkwardly across half of the couch, Sam was still sitting at the other end, awake, and he wasn’t quite smiling but he was _there_ and ( _fuck_ ) he was punching the soles of Dean’s feet the way he used to do when they were teenagers. ‘Sonofabitch,’ Dean said gruffly, ‘didja sleep?’ 

‘I dreamed something,’ Sam said, ignoring the question, ‘listen, I need you to hear this before I forget it. We were in the car driving, it was bright and sunny and your hair was grey. And - I guess mine was too, I mean I couldn’t see it, but I knew that it was. And we - well we were hunting.’ Dean just stared at him a little blankly. 

‘OK, you think it - means somethin’?’ 

A shadow of exasperation crossed Sam’s face. ‘I don’t know, Dean. No, not really. But it was good. I felt happy.’ He took a breath. ‘K, let’s go.’


End file.
